Costitx.Thanks to collaboration agreements with Britain's Open University and Hamburg University, the two new additions to the Astronomy Observatory at Costitx will come into use today, largely to track the movements of planets outside our solar system, to discover so-called supernova stars and to monitor asteroids and other space debris.
The news was given yesterday by the Observatory's Director, Salvador Sanchez who explained that the data gathered by the telescopes will unfortunately not be freely available to fans of astronomy but will instead be controlled through the internet from the offices of the universities.
Sanchez said that he was also pleased yesterday because the acquisition of the two telescopes hadn't meant any cost at all to the Observatory. The advanced technology, he said, will upgrade the presence of Majorca in prestigious astronomy journals.
Sanchez gave reassurances that an asteroid discovered in 2005 which had been forecast to collide with the Earth on 8th November doesn't provide any danger at all.